Who You Gonna Call?

 One of the biggest challenges of being an exotic pet owner - even for legal, relatively run-of-the-mill exotics, such as reptiles, hedgehogs, sugar gliders, etc - can be finding a vet who is willing to treat them.  I've run into this problem in the past, especially when working as a keeper in more rural areas where the vets are fewer and far in between, and tend to focus on the basics - dogs, cats, livestock.  Even the facility that I worked at was confronted by this limitation - at three places where I've worked, we were such small facilities that we didn't have our own full-time vet, and instead contracted one out... a local vet who primarily treated, you guessed it, dogs, cats, and livestock.

Even more worryingly, some of the vets that I've encountered in some of these areas have been... less knowledgeable... about patients.  For example, I had a tortoise fecal sample go to a vet, who freaked out about the parasite load - but tortoises as a rule tend to have lots of worms, not desirable but not unusual.  He wanted us to put the tortoise on Ivermectin (a medication which, for unfortunate reasons, has become a lot more famous and popular in recent, post-COVID years).  Ivermectin is a dewormer commonly used in zoos for a variety of species.  Only problem?  It's deadly to tortoises.  He was, in his ignorance of chelonians, preparing to swap out a minor inconvenience for a deadly "solution."

Not surprisingly, many exotic pet owners I know have convinced themselves that they know more than any vet could, and as such never take their pets to the vet.  Or, they gather on online chatrooms and facebook pages, where the advice of the expert and the ignorant can be very hard to distinguish, and I've seen some truly bad ideas posted and accepted as authority.   This, also, is undesirable.

The best solution is to have a plan of veterinary treatment before you get your animal, and start a relationship with your vet before it's an emergency.  Find one you trust, and who has a chance to establish a "normal" baseline with your animal before there is a problem.  And, as many of the zoos that I've worked with have come to learn, sometimes following painful disaster... it's generally worth hiring your own full-time vet, one who will come to develop some expertise in your animals.  A tiger might be a big cat on the inside at the end of the day, but most vets don't come out of school prepared for the challenges of treating a sloth.